Keyword: Tea Party

Political courage took a back seat to political calculation as the renegade memo on the investigation of Carter Page was made public, completing the eclipse of the President’s State of the Union and, at least for the moment, the increasingly corrosive immigration debate. While the fiddling continues in a smoldering Washington, D.C., the Comptroller delivered bad news of a more mundane variety to the Senate Finance Committee this week, while financial bad news of a different sort added to the woes of a (somewhat) surprisingly beleaguered George P. Bush in his increasingly contentious primary battle to remain Land Commissioner. Beto had better financial news than either Glenn or George P. (That sentence shows why the first name thing works better for O’Rourke). National media attention to a report on white supremacist groups focusing recruiting efforts on college campuses featured their fairly piddling efforts on Texas campuses, through our data suggests that White Supremacy pretty clearly doesn’t have a data analytics department.

You may not be aware that the University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, as of this writing, has been measuring Tea Party identification since 2010, which means that we have collected (an astonishing, if I do say so myself) 24 surveys of registered voters in Texas that can examine Tea Party attitudes alone, in comparison to Republicans as a whole, non-Tea Party Republicans, Democrats, and, of course, the entire electorate.

President Donald Trump will be in Dallas for a fundraiser Wednesday in a week which will also see a convocation of Trump fundraisers presided over by T. Boone Pickens and a paid speech by Donald Trump, Jr. at the University of North Texas. The Trump visit comes in the wake of fresh data from the UT/Texas Tribune Poll on Texans’ attitudes toward Trump job performance overall, his handling of various public matters, and his character traits.

The Texas Tribune rolled out the first wave of results from the October 2017 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll thursdays, with 3 more days of nuggets to come. Here are a few observations from the first day of results, plus a few tidbits of data from the crosstabs. (We’ll release the entire set of crosstabs and the usual files next week after the Tribune rollout is complete.)

The June 2017 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll underlined both the Lt. Governor’s success at getting his name out there, but also the continuing strength of a better known Governor. An increase in the salience of legislative efforts to regulate transgender people’s access to bathrooms among conservatives in the GOP is a testament, though, to Patrick’s ability to capture the imagination of his base. Or maybe it’s hearts and minds, judging by some of the patterns of support for another conservative cause, so-called conscience exemptions. You don’t need to practice much pattern recognition, though, to pick up on the odd fact that, for all the declarations that some people in the legislature let conservatives down in the 85th, the Tea Party faction seems pretty pleased with the achievements of the legislature and its leadership. One thing no one seems interested in is throwing legal voters in jail, even if they fail to use their photo id when they vote. Seems there are limits after all.

Nonetheless, pre-election polling in Texas reveals a group of conservative voters who do report feeling left behind by changes in the economy, while also holding attitudes that cohere with broader elements of Trump’s rhetoric-- and, crucially, with the appeals of the most conservative factions of the Texas GOP. The beginning of the Trump presidency will come 10 days after the opening gavel of the 85th Texas Legislature. While the internal dynamics of the state’s political system traditionally drive most policy and politics in the session, Trump’s ascension to the presidential bully pulpit, at the head of one-party rule in Washington, markedly changes the national context and its possible impact.

To say that the Tea Party has exerted an influence on Texas Politics over the last half decade is a major understatement, but what often gets left unexplored is the relative size of the group of Texans who identify with the Tea Party in the face of their outsized presence in the GOP primary process.

While proposals to repeal birthright citizenship have not been widely or consistently discussed proposals in the mainstream, University of Texas/Texas Tribune polling has included an item on this proposal as part of a battery of questions that explored different attitudes toward a range of immigration policy proposals in the February 2011.

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